I am going to speak to you today about the Yakima River Decision Support System, or DSS. What it is. How it works. And what went into its development.
As you have heard from the two previous speakers, for the last few years the Yakima Basin Storage Feasibility Study has been underway with the development of numerous complex models by several agencies.

The intent of this mammoth modeling effort is, of course, to possess the ability to comprehensively evaluate various storage alternatives in the Yakima Basin.
The obvious challenge is—How does one assimilate and organize the huge amount of information attained from these models so that alternative analyses may be conducted in an orderly, comparable and repeatable manner. And output can be attained that clearly identifies an alternative’s strengths and weaknesses.

That, in a nutshell, is what a DSS is designed to do.

There were a few of us who collaborated in the development of the Yakima Basin DSS but before I proceed I would like to acknowledge the principle architects—They would be Ken Bovee and his colleagues at the USGS’ Fort Collins Science Center. These folks know what they are doing, having developed a DSS for the Delaware River system in the northeast and one for the upper Missouri River within the last six years.